Musicians?

[danofarlington]

Yup, it's a Deering Crossfire, wearing a Borsalino Alessandria...

Now that you've identified it, that hat may have to go on my list: The Borsalino Alessandria mink color from Peters Brothers. It does look good.

 

[Neophyte]

I've always liked the Borso Alessandria. It's a beautiful hat, it's availabe in some awesome colors...

...and my name is Alexander lol .

 

[Mav]

Say...that instrumental line-up spells IRISH TRAD. to me (especially the inclusion of the bouzuoki, which I also played), and/or something at least very close, like Scottish trad.. Tenor banjo wouldn't really fit in with Old Time/Bluegrass. Am I on to something here?

You are, indeed. Got sucked into trad by playing guitar for a RSCD band, got bored and taught myself 'zook, started playing with a little local Irish pub band, wanted to play in sessions as well so picked up mando, figured if I could play mando, fiddle would be easy (I was wrong), and there ya go. Banjo was a natural, as all this stuff is tuned more- or- less the same, and I wanted something obnoxious that I could play next to our whistler/ piper when he was on GHB's or parlor pipes. Played in about 4 little bands over about 8 years (the inner personal politics are as bad there as anyplace else), got tired of it, and went back to Spanish classical guitar. Still mess with trad a bit, though, mostly when camping.
'Zook is a great instrument- you can get some really weird modal stuff out of it. I still like to pick up my Octavious every once in awhile.

 

[Mario]

You are, indeed. Got sucked into trad by playing guitar for a RSCD band, got bored and taught myself 'zook, started playing with a little local Irish pub band, wanted to play in sessions as well so picked up mando, figured if I could play mando, fiddle would be easy (I was wrong), and there ya go. Banjo was a natural, as all this stuff is tuned more- or- less the same, and I wanted something obnoxious that I could play next to our whistler/ piper when he was on GHB's or parlor pipes. Played in about 4 little bands over about 8 years (the inner personal politics are as bad there as anyplace else), got tired of it, and went back to Spanish classical guitar. Still mess with trad a bit, though, mostly when camping.
'Zook is a great instrument- you can get some really weird modal stuff out of it. I still like to pick up my Octavious every once in awhile.

I played Irish trad (a few songs, but mostly jigs 'n reels) for about ten years, mainly as a guitar accompanist (tuned in DADGAD, which I still use today as my standard tuning). Had a couple of bands but most of the time I worked as a sideman, on stage and at countless sessions all over Europe (I went to Brittany a lot). Over the years I also added music from Brittany, Sweden, England, Central France and the Balkans to my repertoire. It was a great time, but most of the trad heads here are so incredibly closed-minded, they want to play the same stuff over and over again and never change a single note, because it's not traditional. They never really understood that particular bit about a living tradition. Couldn't stand it anymore...

 

[Mav]

I played Irish trad (a few songs, but mostly jigs 'n reels) for about ten years, mainly as a guitar accompanist (tuned in DADGAD, which I still use today as my standard tuning).

I love DADGAD for fingerstyle celtic, but it killed me using it for rhythm- I never found a reasonable way to finger an E chord (or any of it's permutations). Dropped D works great for that, too- I put a HipShot on my steel string so I could flip back and forth between that and standard.

It was a great time, but most of the trad heads here are so incredibly closed-minded, they want to play the same stuff over and over again and never change a single note, because it's not traditional. They never really understood that particular bit about a living tradition. Couldn't stand it anymore...

You got that right. Same issue here, and probably the biggest reason I got out of it, as well. Our former bodhran player, still a buddy of mine, is trying to get me to play in a once a month session here in town. In theory, sessions should be just a bunch of trad musicians having fun and drinking beer, but here it's a competitive sport, and they're usually a group of self- appointed experts on what is "traditional." How dare anyone suggest that a Brittany or Old Time tune could possibly be slipped into a set of Irish tunes.

 

[Mario]

I love DADGAD for fingerstyle celtic, but it killed me using it for rhythm- I never found a reasonable way to finger an E chord (or any of it's permutations).

Hand me a guitar in standard tuning and you'll find me lost. I've been playing DADGAD almost exclusively (with the inclusion of a few other open tunings for certain fingerstyle arrangements) for so many years now that it has become my second nature.

You got that right. Same issue here, and probably the biggest reason I got out of it, as well. Our former bodhran player, still a buddy of mine, is trying to get me to play in a once a month session here in town. In theory, sessions should be just a bunch of trad musicians having fun and drinking beer, but here it's a competitive sport, and they're usually a group of self- appointed experts on what is "traditional." How dare anyone suggest that a Brittany or Old Time tune could possibly be slipped into a set of Irish tunes.

For this kind of people we coined the term 'session police'. They are a pest!

 

[KK]

Played clarinet starting in 4th grade. Picked up guitar in 7th grade. Got an electric in 9th. Memorized all the Jamerson bass lines listening to the station at the end of the AM dial. Finally bought an awful bass for $14.52 in 10th grade and sat there for a month with the Moby Grape LP, putting my fingers wherever they sounded right. Then I found all those Jamerson lines just laid under my fingers. But we mostly played Cream and Hendrix and all that, beach parties and bar mitzvahs and sweet 16s. Later ended up in a jug band playing ragtime clarinet, just noodling around behind everything. We worked for $25 each and all we could drink. We usually lasted a night or three 'til the owner figured out it was costing him a lot more than it first seemed. Then I wound up in the Air Force. Some guy came to the barracks and asked if anyone played, so I went to the band hall and hacked my way through a pile of overtures on clarinet. They took me. I wanted to play bass but couldn't read bass clef, but ended up playing bass anyway as soon as I got to my first duty station. Did that for 28 years.

 

["Skeet" McD]

's ist immer so....woimmer man ist!

I played Irish trad (a few songs, but mostly jigs 'n reels) for about ten years, mainly as a guitar accompanist (tuned in DADGAD, which I still use today as my standard tuning). Had a couple of bands but most of the time I worked as a sideman, on stage and at countless sessions all over Europe (I went to Brittany a lot). Over the years I also added music from Brittany, Sweden, England, Central France and the Balkans to my repertoire. It was a great time, but most of the trad heads here are so incredibly closed-minded, they want to play the same stuff over and over again and never change a single note, because it's not traditional. They never really understood that particular bit about a living tradition. Couldn't stand it anymore...

Lieber Mario: Sessions have their own tone, and one must poke around until (if one is lucky) one finds the right group to play with. But I expect you know that!

Trad music is a particularly difficult call: a viable tradition must always change; otherwise....it is not a living tradition at all, but an animated corpse; but on the other hand, to be truly traditional, it must ALWAYS look backwards to where it came from. These are difficult things to balance...I don't care WHAT people do to Irish trad (bring on your digeridoos and hip-hop beats!); but, if you do that....for me, at least, to consider you traditional musicians, you'd better be able to play an unaccompanied fiddle/flute duet like it might have been heard in rural Ireland in 1890. Tradtional music, IMHO, must always be rooted in what has gone before...if it loses that, it's fusion, not trad.

When I was cutting my teeth on trad in the early 1970s in NYC (a great time and place to be doing so!) there were eejits of all sorts: on the one side, the CCE omadhauns who were convinced that the Chieftains were devils incarnate....because--for instance--of their "the foxchase" (which had orchestration)....but who worshiped the "traditional" piping "foxchase"....losing track of the fact that that showpiece was at least, if not more, novel and "untraditional" in 1810. And, on the other side of the coin, there were the anarchocommies of the Irish Arts Centre who forbade the singing of any ballads not in the Irish...thereby wiping out close to a millennium of Irish history because it was "politically incorrect." And NOBODY had any good words to say about songs like My Wild Irish Rose and Danny Boy...because they weren't "truly Irish" (absolutely correct)...but missing the point that the very people who bore the tradition into our own period, preserving it against all odds, LOVED those songs, and felt that they were as valid an expression of their Irishness as the pure drop of trad music.

The point being--if there's any point!--that idiots we will always have with us: sometimes playing fiddles, pipes and flutes.

Do you ever get to the Rheinland? about once a year I make it over to visit and concertize with my regular pianist, who lives in the outskirts of Essen; chances are I'll be over in early December. Perhaps someday we'll share a tune.

Until then...keep playing the chunes, and don't let the eejits get you down! Musiziere immerfort! und laß die a-löchen dich nicht ärgern!

"Skeet"

 

[T Smith]

Been drumming off and on since around 72, played in a few bands back in the day. Haven't really played with other musicians seriously in quite a while, just some impromptu stuff with friends and my guitarist step son, my wife loves for me to play along with cd's. Used to be strictly rock, now added a lot of blues, wish I could jazz...

 

[Mav]

Hand me a guitar in standard tuning and you'll find me lost. :

Understood. Anything tuned in 4ths makes little to no sense in a reasonable world. I spent a little bit of time researching this, once I had gotten to my pinnacle of frustration with classical guitar (it was a love/ hate relationship for a long time). In short, this lunatic, Fernando Sor, pretty much invented what we know as the modern guitar, with it's standard tuning. That combination takes full advantage of the instrument's foibles, but primarily when used in the traditional Spanish style. Try playing any Bach or Mozart arrangement for guitar, and you'll end up wanting to take your own life, if you can uncramp your left hand long enough to do the deed. Mess about with Exercise in Bm, Caprichio Arabe,, or Tarrega's Fugue and you'll realize what was intended by that g-dawful tuning.

 

[Derek WC]

My lips were made by Stradivarius, if that counts.
In other words, I sing, and whistle, but I want to learn how to play a trombone, because it's my favorite instrument, but they cost so darn much.

 

[Fletch]

Go on eBay. You can find a decent one for less than $200.

 

[jbucklin]

Understood. Anything tuned in 4ths makes little to no sense in a reasonable world. I spent a little bit of time researching this, once I had gotten to my pinnacle of frustration with classical guitar (it was a love/ hate relationship for a long time). In short, this lunatic, Fernando Sor, pretty much invented what we know as the modern guitar, with it's standard tuning. That combination takes full advantage of the instrument's foibles, but primarily when used in the traditional Spanish style. Try playing any Bach or Mozart arrangement for guitar, and you'll end up wanting to take your own life, if you can uncramp your left hand long enough to do the deed. Mess about with Exercise in Bm, Caprichio Arabe,, or Tarrega's Fugue and you'll realize what was intended by that g-dawful tuning.

Check out Bill Edwards's "Fretboard Logic" for a very comprehensive explanation of and argument for standard tuning. His CAGED system is the best out there for demystifying the fretboard and I have used this system for teaching for years now.

When it comes to classical guitar pieces, legions of great classical guitarists have proven standard tuning to be the most efficient tuning available. BTW, it is my opinion that Sor was a total genius and was much admired by none less than Beethoven. Segovia's collection of the 20 Studies of Sor, fingered by the Maestro himself, is a great place to start. If you can master some of those, then Bach will not pose such a problem. I'm not sure that Mozart translates to the instrument as well as Bach's music does, although Sor did compose the variations on a theme from Mozart's Magic Flute. Other than that, there's not much available in the way of transcriptions for guitar of Mozart's music.

 

[Yeps]

I don't know how I haven't chimed in here before, but music is what I do.

I am in school for vocal performance (classical) and composition, and I also play guitar (bottleneck slide, and my own version of fingerstyle), as well as some piano and any other instrument I get my hands on (mountain dulcimer recently).

This semester I am starting conducting class, so I get to start directing other people. I get to be the one making music with my fingers.

 

[Mr E Train]

I also play guitar (bottleneck slide, and my own version of fingerstyle)

I'm a slide player as well. What kind of guitar do you play? For slide I like my 1930 National Triolian. And what is "your own version of fingerstyle"? I play almost exclusively fingerstyle with bare fingers, which evolved from using right-hand damping techniques when playing slide. I have a lazy thumb, though, so I can't do the boom-chicka Merle Travis thing, it's more of a boom..boom and my fingers fill in the rest in between, if that makes sense.

 

[Yeps]

I'm a slide player as well. What kind of guitar do you play? For slide I like my 1930 National Triolian. And what is "your own version of fingerstyle"? I play almost exclusively fingerstyle with bare fingers, which evolved from using right-hand damping techniques when playing slide. I have a lazy thumb, though, so I can't do the boom-chicka Merle Travis thing, it's more of a boom..boom and my fingers fill in the rest in between, if that makes sense.

I play a relatively new Ibanez that I got for Christmas one year, the action was always too high, but that works great with slide. I have been trying to play the same style as Robert Johnson, and I think I have the feel down pretty well, even if I can never be particularly good unless I sell my soul too.

As for fingerstyle, I call it my version because I was self taught, so I never learned to do things right.

Okay, I just ran downstairs and played a little so that I can describe it better. I tend to arpeggiate my chords with my thumb instead of just playing the base, and then play the melody (as much as I can put in) with my index and middle fingers. Every once in a while, more complicated chords will be plucked, but that is really just about it. It tends to make a very relaxed sound. Sometimes I alternate bass notes in the thumb with plucked chords in the next three fingers, but I am not good at that style.

I also play my electric fingerstyle, mostly just because I wish I could play like Mark Knopfler. (I play blues/folk rock lead, for the most part)

 

[Derek WC]

Go on eBay. You can find a decent one for less than $200.

Thanks, I'll do that.

 

[donnc]

trombone

Go on eBay. You can find a decent one for less than $200.

I see one for $45 in "Keizer" (not too familiar with the Salem area), on craigslist, but I'd go for the $225 Olds in "Jefferson." Even if it's the Ambassador student line, they're not so bad.

 

[jwalls]

I have been working at the bagpipes for a few months now. They drove the neighbors nuts until I started going out to Red Rock to work outdoors.
Alto sax, clarinet, and bass guitar since high school.

 

[donnc]

Bagpipes are relatively loud, as you may be aware. I played a show once in sort of a concert band, where we were on the field at the same time as a large and very good pipe band (I believe Simon Fraser University.) Both bands played the same tune, we seated in rows farther apart than normal, and they marched through us towards the end of the piece. Sitting inside one of the world's best pipe bands is a rather intense experience.